Nabard officials address the news meet in Patna on Wednesday. Picture by Ashok Sinha

The Bihar regional office of National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (Nabard) on Wednesday put Rs 32,077 crore as the credit requirement for the agriculture sector and other priority sectors in the current financial year (2012-13).

Nabard, fully owned by the central government and the Reserve Bank of India, provides support for the development of agriculture and rural sectors. The bank provides financial assistance to the state government for rural infrastructure development, which includes roads, bridges, irrigation, power, social sectors like primary health centres and primary schools.

“Every year, Nabard prepares potential-linked credit plan for each district (of all 38 districts in the state) to assess the credit requirements for agriculture and priority sector which has been pegged at Rs 32,077 crore for 2012-13,” D.V. Deshpande, the chief general manager of Nabard, told reporters in Patna.

He said the projection was generally accepted by the state-level bankers’ committee as credit target for the state which is further divided and allocated to various banks operating in the state as their annual credit target.

A.B. Das, general manager and Pradeep Kumar, deputy general manager were also present during the media interaction. Deshpande also gave a 20-minute PowerPoint presentation on the apex agriculture bank’s achievements in the previous financial year.

Asked whether the corpus was sufficient keeping in mind the state government’s decision to work on agriculture roadmap to boost agri production, Deshpande replied: “We think that the credit plan for agriculture is already too high and ambitious considering the performance of loan disbursement in the last fiscal. During the last fiscal, there was an agri credit plan of Rs 21,000 crore against which Rs 15,000 crore could be disbursed. In that sense, this year’s credit plan is little more than double.”

The chief general manager said Nabard has earmarked Rs 1,784 crore for Bihar this year, which is an increase of 34 per cent over the previous year’s Rs 1,336 crore.

Nabard provided financial assistance to regional rural banks for bringing them on core banking system (CBS) platform, which has further facilitated reaching out to villages with population of 2,000 or more through technological solutions, he said, adding that similar support is being provided to co-operative banks.

“Bihar State Cooperative Bank and all the 22 district central co-operative banks will join under Nabard CBS project by the end of December 2012,” Deshpande said.

“Nabard is playing a pioneering role in the implementation of the system of rice intensification in 10 districts of Bihar covering 6,336 hectares among more than 18,000 families,” said Deshpande, before adding that Rs 2 crore has been disbursed during 2011-12 for supporting the intervention.

Stating that the bank has supported initiatives like joint liability groups, self-help groups and farmers’ clubs, Deshpande said 18,000 joint liability groups have so far been formed and about 2.5 lakh self-help groups to provide soft loans to beneficiaries for agriculture purposes set up.